“Leave that stuff out in the sun,” Moe said, nodding to the pile of spongy runoff laying all around the rig. “Or burn it.”
Moe retrieved his air filtration mask and cleaned it before he tossed it onto his seat and shut all the rig doors.
“Hey, man.” The attendant gestured around at the pile of Moe’s possessions. What do you want us to do about your clothes and bed?”
Moe shrugged. “Burn that stuff, too. Burn all of it.”
Moe climbed up behind the wheel, buckled himself in, and started the rig. With a wave to the attendant, Moe pulled out of A&B Truck Wash and Mini-Mart and jumped on I-15, determined to get home.
Chapter 9
Randy and Jenny Tucker, Center Township, Indiana
Randy used his knife to cut through the cloth truck seats, working by the light of his cell phone. He tore the cloth into strips and cut out several small squares of foam from deeper in the seats. Sweat dripped down his face and off his chin as he worked; the truck cab had become incredibly warm over the ten hours they’d been trapped inside.
He couldn’t see outside except for a faint red glow penetrating the layer of black dust that had settled on the vehicle. They’d tried calling emergency services for hours but received no response, and only one of Jenny’s friends, a girl named Ally, had picked up, although she remained inside her house, afraid to go out.
“Are you sure this will work?” Jenny asked.
“No, but we can’t stay here much longer.”
He opened his wallet and cut two strips of plastic from the sleeve that held his driver’s license. He picked up one of the plastic grocery bags he’d used to haul their drinks from the corner store and cut one small hole for the mouth and a slit for the eyes. He used duct tape to secure a piece of foam over the mouth hole on the inside of the bag and did the same thing with a piece of plastic to cover the eye slit.
Using a thin strip of cloth from the seat, he wrapped it around his face so it covered his mouth, tying it behind his head.
“This will never work,” Jenny said. “Whatever is in the air must be microscopic. A strip of cloth and piece of foam won’t stop it.”
“Yeah, but like I said, I think it has settled down,” Randy replied. “If we can control our breathing and move slowly, we won’t kick any into the air.”
Jenny shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“I don’t either,” Randy said, starting to get annoyed at his sister. “But we can’t stay in here.
He held up a twelve-ounce water bottle they’d been sipping on and shook it. Only a couple mouthfuls remained, and that wouldn’t last them very long, not the way they were sweating. They had two more Cokes, but those weren’t good for hydration. In fact, they would have the opposite effect.
Randy pulled the plastic grocery bag over his head and secured it around his neck with duct tape. He used one hand to move the eye slit up so he could see out of it, then he began experimenting with breathing. The plastic bag puffed out and deflated every time he breathed.
“You’re going to kill yourself.” Jenny shook her head. “Then I’ll be alone.”
“Not going to happen,” Randy said, growing more confident as he pressed his hand against the foam piece, pushing it against his lips. “Just breathe slowly through the foam. If you breathe too long inside the bag, it will fill with carbon dioxide and you’ll pass out.”
“Great news.” Jenny picked up the other plastic bag and punched holes in it like she’d seen Randy do. “We’re going to survive a plague using Dollar Store gas masks.”
“Dollar Store?” Randy raised his eyebrow in question, although Jenny couldn’t see his expression. “These are Fifty-Cent Store gas masks.”
Jenny smiled despite the tears streaking down her cheeks.
“Hey, it’ll be okay,” Randy assured her. “We need to get out to the storage shed. Dad’s got some old air filtration masks in a trunk. We used them last year. If we can get to those, we’ll be golden.”
“I don’t care about that.” Jenny’s tone dripped frustration, and her face twisted up into a grimace. “It’s just...Mom and Dad.”
Randy’s heart sank. He’d tried to think about everything else but their parents for the past several hours, but the dread and anguish kept returning in a vicious cycle. “I know. But we don’t know if Dad is dead. He could still be out there in the truck and trapped like us.”
Jenny fixed him with a doubtful look and continued fashioning her mask.
“Look, Jen. Mom and Dad would want us to get out of this. So, you need to give this everything you’ve got. We owe it to them.”
Jenny stared at her brother for a moment, gave a long sniff, and nodded. When she finished making her mask, Randy helped her put it on. She practiced breathing for a few times to get the hang of it.
Randy put his hand on the door handle and looked back at her. “Are you ready?”
The plastic bag nodded in reply, and Jenny scooted closer to him on the seat. Randy pulled the door handle and popped the door. He eased it wide with one hand while turning on his cell phone flashlight application with the other. The bag shifted on his face, momentarily blinding him, so Randy paused to move the plastic slit around so he could see again.
One leg out of the truck, Randy held up the cell phone and directed the light all around. He didn’t see any black tendrils floating in the air, but it covered the ground. The crimson fuzz had changed to an eerie red glow, leaving black borders around the edges.
“Careful,” Todd said over his shoulder. “BD on the ground everywhere.”
“BD?”
“Big Death.” He shrugged. “Sorry, I couldn’t think of a better name.”
Without waiting for a reply, Randy stepped out of the truck, careful not to place his feet on spots that glowed red. He moved about ten yards from the truck, shining his light all around. A few minutes with the plastic bag on, and his head was already sweating.
He breathed in through the foam piece, waiting for his throat to clench up. It didn’t. He exhaled through the foam, happy when the bag around his head didn’t expand. Turning back to the truck where Jenny waited in the seat, he nodded. “It’s okay. Take it slow.”
Jenny climbed out of the truck, placing her feet in the same spots as Randy, tiptoeing over anything that glowed red.
In the meantime, Randy had bent lower, trying to get a better look at the stuff. The eerie shade of red glowed from pinhead-sized nodules resting on top of the fuzz. “I think it’s mold,” he said. “Like mold on top of a moldy piece of bread, you know?”
“Only a lot angrier.” Jenny came up beside him and rested her hand on his arm.
“Yeah. It’s super mad, for sure.”
“Where to?”
Randy looked to the right of their house to the equipment shed. Their father kept the simple tools there like hammers, shovels, rakes, and safety gear. There were gardener’s gloves and, if he remembered correctly, several used gas masks. There was about forty yards of BD between them and the shed, although Randy thought he saw a lot of clear spots where they could step.
Holding up his phone, Randy started forward. “The shed. Be careful.”
Their progress was painstaking as they stepped gingerly over the mold-covered ground. The bag slid around on Randy’s head, and he fought to keep the tiny slit of plastic over his eyes. Once or twice, he forgot to exhale into the foam, and his bag expanded until he could readjust.
After an eternity of time, step after careful step, ankles aching as he walked on his toes, they made it to the shed door. Reddish mold covered the wooden slab from top to bottom, even the handle. Randy pulled a strip of seat cloth from his belt and held it up.
“I’m not sure what will happen when I open this,” Randy said over his shoulder. “So, stand back.”
He allowed Jenny to move away from the door. Then he placed the rag over the handle, turned it, and pulled the door open. The air hissed, and he stepped back, retracing his steps and joining Jenny some ten ya
rds away.
Randy raised his cell phone. In the light, black tendrils spun upward from the ground, reaching a height of about five feet before they settled again.
“That’s one aggressive fungus,” Randy said, swallowing in disbelief.
“Yeah, real nasty stuff,” Jenny agreed. “Did the spray do that? The Harvest Guard?”
“I have no idea. But let’s see if it dies down.”
They stood there for fifteen minutes as the black spores dispersed, drifting down to the ground until the air seemed clear.
“Okay, we can’t stand here all day,” Randy said, his fear finally giving way to courage. “We’ve got to get those masks. Why don’t you stay out here?”
“No way,” Jenny said, and her bag rustled as she shook her head.
“Fine,” Randy replied. “Let’s go.”
He stepped carefully into the shed, exhaling as he stepped across the threshold. He didn’t bother to stop and test the air. If the mold got into his lungs, he’d know it.
A moment later, they were inside. Still standing. Still alive.
“So far so good,” he said, shining his cell phone around. The shed was a twenty-by-twenty structure, lined with shelves of various fertilizers, oil cans, and copper pipe fittings. A big riding lawn mower sat parked to the side. It didn’t appear that the mold had gotten inside the shed yet, there was no red glow, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t in the air. Randy crossed to the workbench at the far side of the shed, looking around for the plastic bin where he thought his father kept the air filtration masks.
When he couldn’t find the bin where he’d last seen it, his fear grew. What if his father had thrown them out? They couldn’t walk around with the bags on their heads. Then he noticed a square shape at the end of the bench with a toolbox resting on top. He moved down the bench, set the toolbox to the side, and put his hands on the lid.
“Wait!” Jenny shouted.
“What?” Randy turned the light back to his sister. He couldn’t see her face, though in his mind he saw her cautious expression.
“Don’t open the bin. We don’t want to contaminate what’s inside.”
“Oh, right.”
“We need a plan for swapping out our masks and staying clean,” she said. “You know, like in those movies about virus outbreaks. The characters always have to go through several levels of decontamination.”
Randy frowned inside his plastic bag. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
Jenny came over and picked up the other end of the bin. “Let’s take this to the house. I have an idea.”
Chapter 10
Burke Birkenhoff, Chicago, Illinois
Burke, Pauline, and seven Durant-Monroe department heads watched news of the outbreak from a boardroom beneath Burke’s apartment. They stared in awe at the television screen as what many were calling “spore clouds” overtook towns and cities from Vermont to Florida.
Images from helicopters and witnesses on the ground showed horrible scenes where people died choking on dark tendrils that moved and twisted like living entities. And as the night wore on, acres of bright red fields spread across the land where the spore clouds settled.
If Burke were a superstitious man, he might call these events evil, or at the very least, apocalyptic in a Biblical sense. Yet, he knew better. His company was at least partially responsible for what was happening, and the uneasy glances from his own people told him they were thinking the same thing, too.
“We caused this.” Trish Cuthbert was the Head of Publicity, and she looked up and down the table accusingly. “We’d heard rumors that R&D needed to do more testing, but we promoted the product anyway.”
“And we told the marketers to push the release date back,” Travis Johnson, Head of the Science Division, added. “I, for one, am shocked that anyone was spraying our product this early. I didn’t even realize we had shipped it. Who authorized this?”
The entire board erupted into shouting and accusations until Burke slammed his fist down on the table, rattling pens and coffee cups.
“I authorized it,” Burke said in a forceful tone. “And several shipments across the world, from Africa to Northern England.”
“Why?” Trish’s eyes narrowed. “If you knew this could happen—”
“I didn’t know this could happen,” Burke said, glancing up at the television screen. “No one could have predicted this.” Burke calmed his tone but kept his eyes hard. “We needed to beat Chem-Lab to market with Harvest Guard or they would have buried us.”
Travis sputtered in amazement. “You authorized a dangerous product for world consumption just to beat Chem-Lab?”
“Keep lecturing me, Travis,” Burke growled at the man, “and you can go find another job. That goes for all of you.”
Travis’s mouth clamped shut, and the rest of the table fell silent along with him.
Burke stood and glared up and down the table at each one of the department heads. He sneered as he addressed them. “You all complained about your bonuses last year. You didn’t have enough money to bribe the Ivy League schools to get your witless children in. You couldn’t afford your second mansions. So, you are as much to blame for this as anyone else.”
Everyone at the table shrank beneath Burke’s withering glare.
“Now, we need to work on a plan,” Burke continued. “Travis, get our best dozen scientists working on some counter measures. Make them work in shifts. And get someone out in the field to get samples of this new fungus.”
“Already done,” Travis said with an assured nod. “But let me get you an update.” The man stood, pulled his phone from his pocket, and walked away from the table.
“Great news,” Burke said, smiling all around. “See, some of us are working pro-actively. How about you, Trish? Have we sent out the official company response?”
Trish sat up in her chair, regaining her composure. “We, um, can’t seem to reach anyone.”
“What do you mean we can’t reach anyone?”
“The news outlets were trying to get hold of us all morning and afternoon,” Trish continued. “Of course, we didn’t want to reply until we agreed on an official position.” Her eyes moved around the room. “Now, we can’t reach anyone at all.”
“That’s impossible,” Burke scoffed. “The news agencies love stories like this. They live for any chance to sink Durant-Monroe Chemicals. They should be chomping at the bit to hear our response.”
“Maybe there aren’t any more reporters left?” Trish’s voice shook. “Maybe they’re running for their lives?”
Burke scoffed. “Are you serious?”
“Either that, or many people are taking a sick day from work.”
As if to verify Trish’s assumptions, the television switched to the CNA anchor desk where the normally slick-looking reporter appeared disheveled. Strands of his hair were out of place, and his eyes held an uncertain fear. The space behind him, often filled with CNA employees looking busy at their desks, was empty.
Only when the camera zoomed in and someone spoke in the background did he realize he was on the air. He lifted his eyes and looked into the camera. “This is Brian McKinney coming to you from the CNA news desk in downtown Chicago. As you can see, we have a skeleton crew after the National Weather Agency declared that a cloud is moving west toward Chicago. The Chicago Health Agency has triggered a critical warning urging people to seek shelter immediately. They estimate the cloud should reach downtown Chicago by early morning, so please stay inside your homes and locate an air filtration mask if you can. Experts do not know how long the threat will remain critical, but witnesses have reported a one-hundred percent casualty rate for those who breathe the toxic matter. I think it’s safe to say that your life depends on following these instructions to the letter. We will continue to feed you news and information as long as we can. This is Brian McKinney, reporting from the CNA news desk.”
The CNA logo appeared on the screen, and a news ticker ran across the bottom of the screen.
> The board room was deathly silent. Burke swallowed, his mouth dry.
“Do you still want me to find some press contacts?” Trish asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Clearly, no,” Burke said with a slight quiver in his tone. He turned to his assistant, Pauline, who had remained silent throughout the entire meeting. “How is Charlie doing on the bus?”
“They’re down in Sub Lot D,” Pauline said. “Waiting.”
“All right,” Burke said, standing up. “Let’s go.”
The entire board erupted in noise as Burke shut his laptop, picked it up, and left the room with Pauline in tow. Everyone else hesitated a moment before they leapt up from their chairs and followed him in a chorus of angry voices. Burke turned left down a long hallway until he reached an elevator reserved for himself and his department heads only. He pressed the button and stepped back to wait.
“Where are we going?” Trish asked, out of breath after running to keep up with the quick-striding Burke.
Burke replied over his shoulder. “We’re getting on a state-of-the-art bus that will take us anywhere we want to go while protecting us from the clouds. We’ll have everything we need. Food, water, and high-grade air filtration. We’ll be safe.”
His department heads murmured with relief, although they had questions.
“I haven’t been able to reach my mother and father in Maine,” Trish said, close to his elbow. “Does the bus have a communication link?”
“Oh, it most assuredly does, Trish,” Burke replied with a smug smile. “We have a high-speed satellite dish and plenty of bandwidth for everyone.”
Trish sighed with relief. “Oh, thank you, Mr. Birkenhoff.”
Burke entered the elevator with Pauline at his side. “No problem, Trish.”
The department heads piled into the elevator, and Pauline hit the button to take them to Sub Lot D. The ride down was a hushed affair, only whispers of nervousness between some of the richest corporate executives in the United States, hoping to save their own hides. Burke wrinkled his nose at the stink of their fear.
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